If you're a keyboardist, you've probably played them. If you're the parent of an aspiring keyboardist, you've probably heard them. If you've ever hung around lifts or airport lounges, or waited on a telephone line to be connected, you've probably experienced them as background music. They are arguably the most played and popular pieces on the planet for pianists ever: Muzio Clementi's ‘Six Progressive Sonatinas’ Op. 36, first published in 1797. Advertised rather unusually as being ‘COMPOSED / AND FINGERED / By Muzio Clementi’, they went through an astounding amount of reprints, revisions and alterations in his lifetime and beyond, and they rivalled his seminal Op. 2 as his most printed publication in every country in which his works were sold.
Regardless of the learning experience a listener or player might have had with these pieces, it is impossible to dismiss them on compositional or stylistic grounds. They are well crafted and utterly charming, exemplars in miniature of sonata, rondo and variation forms. Five of the six are set in the major keys of C, F and G; D is reserved for the last sonatina in Clementi's progressive design. Scales, accompanying patterns, ornamentation and articulation are similarly presented to the performer in increasing levels of difficulty. Throughout, Clementi keeps his student entertained with fashionable topics of the late 1790s: Swiss tunes, murky or ‘bagpipe’ basses and pleasant, playable rondo themes.
What was really so very novel and arguably most attractive to consumers at the time was that they were fingered. Fingered editions were just one of Clementi's many strategic and successful forays into the market for instructive works. They helped elucidate tricky passages and gave the student a handle on awkward or novel fingerings. Printed fingerings additionally obviated the need for music masters to annotate scores messily with the thick, stubby and inefficient crayons and pencils of the late eighteenth century. The Op. 36 Sonatinas were Clementi's second attempt at a fingered edition – the first was not as successful simply as it was so very difficult to perform. This was a 1792 reissue by John Dale of the ‘famous Toccata’ that Clementi apparently played in his legendary competition with Mozart, but now engraved with Clementi's fingerings. These two editions paved and tested the way for the fingerings found in his two greatest didactic works of the early years of the nineteenth century: for amateurs the Introduction to the Art of Playing on the Piano Forte (1801) and for aspiring virtuosos the Gradus ad Parnassum (1817–1826). Indeed, Clementi considered the Op. 36 Sonatinas as the ideal supplement to the first edition of his Introduction.
The ubiquity of the Op. 36 sonatinas in juvenile performances and as teaching pieces has undoubtedly contributed to the overwhelming present-day association of the composer with piano pedagogy. His most recorded works available online, for example, are selections from Op. 36 (and the most famous is probably the third, in C major). A search on YouTube for ‘Muzio Clementi Sonatina’ yields around 5,120 videos, some with over 260,000 views. (At the time of writing, comparative searches for ‘Mozart sonata’ yield around 26,000 results and ‘Beethoven sonata’ over 35,000.) Many of the Clementi recordings are of prepubescent children going through the paces of one of the movements of these works. Their ages are typically highlighted by the uploader (often their parents). Typical comments are something like ‘This is very good I'm just learning the second half but I'm not as fast ad [sic] you’ or ‘I am playing this same piece for an exam!’. The bulk of these recordings are metronomically rigid and fairly mechanical, reflecting the youthfulness of the performers as well as the pedagogical context. The comments talk about how the piece has been ‘well learnt’, not ‘well played’.
Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald has commented on the negative associations of Clementi with didacticism and its influence on the composer's reception history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He rightly observes that the teaching canon has a greater role in influencing tastes and informing opinion than the performing canon because a wider variety of people from different backgrounds learns to play the piano with standardized teaching fare like the Op. 36 sonatinas than experiences so-called professional or canonic repertoire, either as players or listeners. Learning elementary repertoire such as the Sonatinas ‘can be likened to being coerced to eat green vegetables – unappealing, yet good for the constitution’ (Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald, ‘Towards a New Ontology of Musical Classicism: Archaism, Sensationalism and Formal Grammar in the Music of Clementi, Hummel and Jan Ladislav Dussek – and Parallels with Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2001), 4–5). Emptied of everything but their effective pedagogical qualities, Clementi's Sonatinas on YouTube exist only as part of a trajectory towards a more mature pianism. It might well be assumed that the works are to be discarded once the pupil has progressed beyond this developmental stage (and come to understand non-Clementi sonatas, without the diminutive).
The editions of Op. 36 that we have all been learning from over the centuries are manifold and of differing qualities, many with additional markings by editors or pedagogues. The new Henle edition, edited by Ernst-Günter Heinemann, is a clean and accurate version of Clementi's first edition from 1797. Page turns are well judged, the musical text is accurate, clear and legible, and the whole is attractively presented. This Henle edition is perfect for those – and here I have in mind young students – who might be uncomfortable with the beautiful facsimiles of the original editions published by Nicholas Temperley in his landmark anthology The London Pianoforte School, 1766–1860 (20 volumes; New York: Garland, 1985).
More importantly, and herein lies the greatest overall strength of the Henle edition, the older-style ‘Continental’ fingering of the first edition (which uses a ‘+’ for the thumb and indicates the other fingers as 1, 2, 3 and 4) is modernized. There are – thankfully – no editorial fingerings and only Clementi's are retained (in light of the composer's thoughtfulness and attention to practicality, the Preface rather ungenerously refers to them as ‘surprisingly practical’ (vi)). The new ‘thumbs-under’ legato style that facilitates fleet smoothness in all tempos is systematically adhered to throughout in all keys that admit the thumb after the third finger in ascending passages. Clementi's rigorous and exact approach here contrasts with the non-systematic and varied scalar fingering of earlier pedagogues like C. P. E. Bach or Türk, for instance. To hands trained by modern piano exercises, Clementi's fingerings feel entirely suitable. The only occasional spots that feel unusual are repeated two-note patterns that ascend or descend. In 1797 Clementi assigned these to the same pair of fingers: in bar 7 of the first movement of the first sonatina, for example, each two-note group receives the repeating fingering of 4–2. Here the fingers are all on the lowered keys so it is less problematic for hands trained to modern practice; more unusual is when Clementi uses the 4–2 figuring in a descending passage in D major that utilizes the raised keys (for example, in bar 43 of the first movement of the last sonatina). These grouped pairs are precisely the fingering patterns that Beethoven complained about in a letter to Czerny in 1817; he wished rather that ‘all the fingers were used now and then’, opining that of course the paired fingerings would sound ‘pearled’ or ‘like a pearl … but sometimes one wishes for another [kind of] jewel’ (Ludwig van Beethoven, Sämtliche Briefe, ed. Alfred Kalischer (Berlin: Schuster & Loefffler, 1906–1908), volume 3, 214). Clementi and Beethoven shared similar views, for in 1813, when Clementi revised the Op. 36 Sonatinas for their fifth printing, he changed all these kinds of passages, using ‘all the fingers’ now rather than just a few.
Which brings us to the Henle edition's Appendix, which contains the 1813 revised version of only the first sonatina. Heinemann, like many other editors and scholars, dismisses Clementi's revisions as ‘marketing-oriented’, and considers that nothing can ‘disguise the fact that there are no changes to the compositional substance of the Sonatinas’ (vi). True, the 1813 reworkings show only insignificant changes to the notes of the 1797 work, but there is no denying the major changes to other elements, by no means less important. Clementi made thoughtful and careful changes in articulation and ornamentation, in the nuancing of time signatures and tempo markings, in the addition and refinement of slurs and expressive markings, in new decorative fermatas and lead-ins, in the addition of pedal marks and in the imaginative and idiomatic use of the extended upper range provided by the so-called ‘additional keys’. Clementi was an avid reviser throughout his compositional career, turning to earlier works and rewriting them to suit different pianos, different cities and different players. Heinemann's marginalization of the 1813 version to a single sonatina in an appendix seems to strengthen the unfortunate – and I think misguided – belief, first outlined by Leon Plantinga, that the revisions are ‘slap-dash’ and ‘worse than useless’. The autograph revisions in the Library of Congress, for example, are anything but casual, instead showing a meticulous attention to detail; for Plantinga, nevertheless, all they amount to is a ‘generous sprinkling of new “expression marks”’. ‘It is disappointing’, he continues, ‘to see a man of Clementi's ability resorting to such expedients in the apparent pursuit of financial gain and a higher score of opus numbers’ (Leon Plantinga, Clementi: His Life and Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 160). At the very least, one hopes that these revisions will be consulted in the forthcoming Clementi Opera Omnia published by Ut Orpheus Edizioni in Bologna, which appears to differ from the current ‘Urtext Edition’ printed by the same organization, an edition that also ignores or marginalizes Clementi's fascinating revisions.
In a similarly outmoded vein, the curious student who reads Heinemann's Preface gets a glimpse of Clementi's career as mediated by the so-called great masters: we learn of the competition with Mozart, that he was overshadowed by Haydn, and that he was the first English publisher of important works by Beethoven (vi). Clementi was, of course, one of the most highly respected composers and performers of his day, and surely the time has come for us to appreciate him on his own terms, and recognize his later revisions as authoritative; in other words acknowledge, as we do for others, his Fassungen letzter Hand.
